Friday, April 14, 2006

My family is my life, once again.

My daughters are always pleased when someone says they look like their mother or when someone says they will grow up to be like her.

When my oldest was asked to write a profile of herself, she finished on this note:

Her most influential person in her life is her mother.She says that her Mom is everything she wants to be: tall, strong, beautiful, smart, and kind.

When her mom read that, it made her cry.

Then our six year old asked her "Mommy, when I grow up, will I look like you?" When she was told "Yes" she jumped up and down for joy and told her mom that "that makes me so happy!"

It makes me so pleased that both my daughters love their mother so that above all they want to be like her. I see my daughters and I feel like the father in Mulan, who is just so very pleased with his daughter. They and my wife are my life and why I live. I'm back to where I started before everything fell apart, where the thing I want most, and love most, is my family.

3 comments:

Barb
said...

That is great that your children look up to their mother. I read that teens are often not able to be mature enough to be a friend with their mom. Often, they can be a friend with their mom's friend. However, the dynamics of a mother daughter relationship at that time often require space. Of course, children and preteens are usually much more open and affectionate. Whether your teen exhibits any of the above traits, it sounds like she really has a lot of respect for her mom!

The death of a child can cause not only devastating grief, but later serious mental illness as well, researchers reported last week. The study of more than a million Danish parents showed that losing a child under the age of 18 raised the risk of serious mental crisis, requiring hospitalization, by 67 percent. And it takes five years for the risk to subside, the researchers reported in last week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Women were the most vulnerable, according to the study. Their chances of ending up in a psychiatric hospital for the first time increased 78 percent following a child's death. Fathers who lost a child had a 38 percent increased risk of being hospitalized for psychiatric illness. The team, led by Jiong Li of the University of Aarhus in Denmark, also found that the risks ''were highest during the first year after bereavement, remained significantly increased five years or more after the loss," and went down if the parents had more than one child. Previous studies have shown that losing a parent during childhood or losing a spouse also heightens the risk of mental illness.